Becoming an Insider: Positionality, Ethics, and Methods in a Turn to Institutional Ethnography in China

This paper examines how an unplanned transformation from classical ethnography to institutional ethnography during my long-term research in a rapidly developing village in China reshaped my positionality, ethics, and methods. Initially positioned as a pure researcher, I became gradually embedded in a newly established institution tasked with local development and governance. I later came to understand this shift through institutional ethnography as a sensitising lens that attends to everyday work, texts-in-circulation, and ruling relations. Insider status was not a given but continually made through spatial, temporal, and emotional labour that enabled access while binding the researcher to institutional rhythms. This proximity altered the force of language: ordinary remarks could circulate as texts, acquire coordinating power, and generate new forms of accountability once participation had effects. These entanglements, in turn, demanded adaptive methods. What counted as data shifted toward documents, coordination routines, and tacit cues of institutional life, while inscription relied on retrospective fieldnotes and context-sensitive elicitation, tempered by conversations beyond the institution to maintain analytic distance. Rather than offering a blueprint, the paper treats this transformation itself as an object of methodological and ethical reflection and offers portable guidance for researchers working in China and other institution-driven settings. By specifying how ruling relations reorganise what can be known, what must be owned, and how positionality is continually remade when research and intervention are inseparable, this paper contributes to emerging conversations on institutional ethnography, insider research, para-/collaborative ethnography, and situated ethics.